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the die is cast I organized all of this with my spirit and soul centered on the greatness of the Patria and on the happiness of her people. —Carlos Vicente Aloé, head of Editorial ALEA The events of October 1945 revealed a chasm between the “representatives of public opinion” and broad sectors of the Argentine public far deeper than the proprietors of Buenos Aires commercial newspapers cared to admit. Yet the press’s unanimity in celebrating Perón’s fall from grace and disparaging his supporters was breached by a single newspaper: La Época. Owned and run by the Yrigoyenist Radical Eduardo Colóm, the paper had defied what seemed common sense in decrying Perón’s ouster, and alone had urged on the popular mobilization that brought Perón’s resurgence. With the commercial press assembled in a common front against the colonel and his supporters, the outpouring of popular sentiment in the mobilizations of October 17–18 found its only echo in La Época, which alone could now lay claim to representing an undeniably large and suddenly powerful sector of the Argentine population. This incongruity between the profound polarization of the public and the unanimity of the nation’s most powerful dailies would prove untenable in the coming months; the small La Época alone could not resolve this contradiction. If only one newspaper backed him in October 1945, however, in five years Perón would succeed not only in building a vast and staunchly loyal media apparatus , but in virtually eliminating the opposition press. The deep inroads into traditional press discourse and the legal status of newspapers made during the military period had laid the basis for a profound transformation of the Argentine press. Beyond bringing many newsworkers to the Peronist cause, the 1944 Journalist’s Statute had placed the Argentine newspaper industry on a new juridical footing vis-à-vis the state, lending legal weight to the notion 6 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 177 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 177 11/3/11 3:36 PM 11/3/11 3:36 PM 178 / the fourth enemy that the press’s practical commercial aspects posed a constant threat to the properly cultural and informative mission of journalism. Similarly, the sudden political protagonism of a large sector of Argentine society clearly bereft of representation in the country’s traditional media had effectively undermined claims that the existing press reflected the full spectrum of “public opinion.” Assertions that only the nation’s newspaper entrepreneurs could sustain universal citizen rights to expression and representation in the press simply clashed with the lived experience of much of the newly mobilized Argentine public. As editorialists at one of the new Peronist newspapers would claim, “the big press and public opinion have divorced.”1 Perón’s subsequent assumption of the presidency in the first clean elections in nearly two decades gave his government a degree of legitimacy that both the de facto regime and its opposition had clearly lacked. Rather than signaling a reversal of the previous regime’s social project, the return to constitutional rule placed in Peronist hands the means to expand it. That he now ruled in good measure through the constitutional mechanisms that members of the opposition had assumed would halt the Peronist advance lent Perón a tremendous advantage in clashes with the traditional press. Between 1943 and 1946, statedirected attempts to reshape the Buenos Aires press had met with uneven results at best. These experiments did, however, help establish a competing discourse on journalism as a vehicle of collective citizenship—with the state as a barrier against the corrupting influences of commerce—that laid the groundwork for a far more successful media project. Following their electoral victory, Perón and his still amorphous Peronist movement could create a dramatically different media landscape even while portraying their actions as consonant with the constitution, social justice, the public good, and democracy. The vast para-state media apparatus that Perón would build between 1946 and 1951 clearly also owes much to his control of the patronage capacity of a wealthy, rapidly expanding Argentine state, the particular authoritarian bent of much of his movement, and the lessons he drew from his ill-fated alliance with Raúl Damonte Taborda. Still, to attribute the transformation of the Argentine press in the years of Perón’s presidency to nothing more than a mix of coercion and co-optation is to ignore the degree to which traditional, antistatist and market-based understandings of...

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